MMORPG – Page 220

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was as the post title might give away… a really good night. Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds. The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead. The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests… which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems. There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest. This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players. Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us… but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos. Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to. The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad. While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot… I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights. Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence. I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks. It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do. All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun… except for maybe that middle section. There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four. I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content. That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood… the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content. I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content. Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior. Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell. The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice. That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people… so many other options open up.

Tiny Black Mage

February 24, 2017 by Belghast

My madness continues… and last night I joined in with Grace and eventually Storm and Muspel to do some Palace of the Dead. Essentially PotD is the new FATE grinding, and while it can be sort of repetitive, I never seem to get tired of it. I mean I thought Tam was insane when he went through his own period of time where he lived in dank dungeon, but now I finally get it. What I am loving about it is that I can just hop in… run a bunch of Palace of the Dead… mentally be somewhere else like watching a movie or a television show and then still feel like I made significant progress at the end of the night. The first goal has been to catch up my classes to 50, because it is going to allow me to have a massive house cleaning of everything that has been clogging my retainers. I have a problem with gear, because I know that eventually I would love to have every single class to the level cap. That is just the sort of person I am. In World of Warcraft I actually achieved this goal prior to the launch of legion and had at least one of every alliance character sitting at 100, and three horde characters as well.

Currently I have my Warrior sitting at 60 and he is my only viably geared character for doing big kid stuff. Then you have my Dragoon that I also leveled to 60, but promptly abandoned because playing that class in Heavensward was just so much less enjoyable for me than it was in ARR. When I was last furiously playing the game I was working on my Bard, which had become my defacto dps class for awhile and I managed to get it up to 55. Then we drop down to my 50s which are Paladin that I have not touched since Heavensward because I simply don’t really like playing a Paladin tank. We have my newly raised trio of casters in the form of the Scholar, Summoner and Black Mage all sitting at 50. Then we drop down to some 30 somethings with Ninja at 38, Monk at 33, and Dark Knight at 33. I have yet to even pick up the quest to be a Machinist or an Astrologian but at some point I probably need to do that so that I can weave those into the rotation as well. Now I am sort of torn as to what I should pick to level next, but for the moment I am leaning towards either the Dark Knight because I miss playing heavy armor classes… or the Ninja because they are just really fun to play.

The other set of goals that is staring me in the face is that when I last left my crafting… I had managed to push everything up to 21… with mining and foraging sitting at 50. At some point I really want to start this grind again and push everything up to at least the point where I can make glamour prisms. In theory I should be doing my beast tribe dailies to use those to level my crafting, but I just haven’t reached a point of getting back into the game enough to sort everything out to be able to do that. Once I finished with the Sahagin I sort of let the beast tribe thing die once again… but in theory should be doing the Ixal at least for crafting levels. Whatever the case it seems like I have been assimilated back into Final Fantasy XIV, and have more goals than I can realistically accomplish. My Warrior gear could also always be improved, but I am just finding PotD a relaxing way to spend my evenings… but sadly one that is not terribly interesting to write blog posts about.

Random Screenshots #3

February 23, 2017 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about. Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm… when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30. Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch. As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3. That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching. It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show… be prepared for some disturbing content. That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode. Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about. I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar. I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners. Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is. The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion. For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt. Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable… but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked. Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me… where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home. I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams. This is one of those games that I root hard for… just from a distance.

We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do… but still don’t end up playing that often. I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype. I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized. I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed. I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content… let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne. I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point… they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing. I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing. This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World. To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character. To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create. However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it. Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on. When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed. I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long… and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it. This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp. If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender… you wind up with Blood Dragon. If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory. It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry… nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.